RUSH: I’m at a big disadvantage here. I have some charts to deal with this so-called controversy between Trump and Axios and the so-called way we tabulate deaths either as a percentage of the population or a percentage of the number of cases. Trump has his way of doing it.
Now, CNN and the Drive-Bys are all over Trump falsely claims this, Trump falsely claims that, Trump lies about this, Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about. They show pictures of him trying to figure out charts that he’s got there. And so I spent some time at the top of the hour looking at some charts from the Johns Hopkins site and others.
I have to tell you, folks, I am lost with charts. I need words. I’ve already told you. If you can tell me in 15 seconds what a-two-minute video says I’ll prefer the 15 seconds of your words than two minutes of video. I’m interested in digesting the salient points as quickly as possible.
So I’ve got charts and graphs here, which attempt to prove that Trump is right. But I don’t have any more than two and a half minutes at a time while the program is underway to try to digest these charts. They take a lot of work for me because I’m a word guy, not a charts and graphs and try to translate the upper axis, the lower axis and all this other garbage, plus putting them on the Dittocam, most of the graphics are so small, you couldn’t even see ’em if I did.
But the chart that I have, I found a way to put it into words. It shows that Trump was using actual numbers from Johns Hopkins. And, you know, we can link to the Johns Hopkins website at RushLimbaugh.com. We have in the past. You could go to the Hopkins site and you can see what Trump is talking about. It’s not hard. Trump is the one that’s actually being scientific here.
The Johns Hopkins site shows two different charts. The case fatality rate and the death rate per 100,000. Now, in medicine and in science, they always talk about the case fatality rate, the death per 1,000 is far less reliable because countries have all kinds of different ways of counting deaths by a disease.
And even in the United States we can’t get a consistent way. We learned yesterday that the hospitals are now admitting that there’s money to be made in every death that can be chalked up to COVID-19. Remember the controversy we had in Florida where 300 different testing sites, testing locations were reporting 100 percent positives?
In other words, everybody that came in tested positive for COVID-19. It’s not possible. And yet they were reporting it at 300 different sites. So the same thing happens with the death rate. They’re reporting people dying from COVID-19 even if they haven’t died from it, but if they’ve got it. If they die of kidney failure, if they die of diabetes, if they die of cancer but they also have COVID, guess what? They’re said to have died from COVID.
Why? Well, there’s a bunch of reasons, A, there’s money in it. B, there’s politics in it. Right now the more people dying of COVID, the better for the Democrat Party. Who’s reporting these numbers? Who is in charge of reporting and interpreting these numbers? The Drive-By Media is. And if they want the number of deaths associated with COVID-19 to go up and rise, they can do that and then they can blame it all on Trump.
And when Trump comes along and says, “Hey, it is what it is,” the number of deaths, the number of cases. He has no other choice but than to look at it for what it is. He has no choice but than to look at it as it is. He’s the president of the United States. He can’t wish it away. And that’s not what he’s trying to do with positive thinking. Not trying to wish it away.
So, at any rate, in medicine and science they always talk about the case fatality rate, the death per 100,000. It’s a tough thing to do because of the reporting in terms of cause of death, countries differ greatly in this. The United States and the U.K. are near the top of this chart because they count people who never even tested positive as dying of COVID when other countries do not. Why are we doing this?
So of course the media wants that particular chart used. And Trump is not looking at that chart. The fatality-per-case chart shows that the U.S. is near the bottom, which is good. Fatality-per-case is what Trump is looking at. You take the number of cases of COVID versus how many people die from it, that’s what Trump is looking at. That’s where he says progress is being made. The fatality rate is coming down. The death per capita puts us, along with the U.K., at the top the way Axios and the media is looking at it. Death as a percentage of population, per capita.
What does that tell you? There’s different ways of looking at it, but the case fatality rate is far more indicative. You got X-number of people who report testing positive. How many of them die? That’s what you want to know. The per capita rate tabulates the number of deaths compared to the whole population, including people that have not tested positive for it.
Well, what would you rather know? Would you rather know the survivability rate among people who get it? Or would you rather know what the fatality rate is per capita. You know, X-number of people in the country, how many people die? Which is more relevant to you? It would seem to me that if you don’t get COVID-19, you can’t possibly die from it. So you would be interested in what is the case fatality rate. If you get it, what are the odds? That’s what Trump is talking about.
Now, on Friday the CDC head honcho, this Redfield guy, testified to Congress that U.S. hospitals do have a financial incentive to count deaths as COVID-19 deaths. That confirms what Dr. Birx said, the Scarf Queen, weeks ago, that she thought the death numbers were inflated by 25%. It’s another reason why there should be a lot of, I don’t know, doubt or suspicion attached here.
But if you can — and I’m sure that Koko and Koko Jr. have heard me say that we will provide a link to the Johns Hopkins website. If you do, there’s two things to look at — the case fatality rate, and that’s where you’ll find this at the bottom — or the per capita, the percentage of the population. That’s where you’ll find this at the top. That’s what the media is using.
The case fatality rate, again, how many people have tested positive, whatever number that is, versus how many are dying. And that gives you the morbidity rate. As far as I’m concerned, personally and being interested in it, that latter way would be of more relevance to me. ‘Cause if you don’t get COVID-19, then the odds of dying from it are pretty slim. So what does it matter what percentage of the population? But if you do get it, okay, now we’re talking. Now what are the odds of survival?
Well, that’s what you can calculate with the case fatality rate. And that’s what Trump said. So these guys, “Well, he has a different way of thinking. Trump has this really curious thing called positive thinking. It’s a philosophy, the idea that you say something and you believe it and it happens.”
I’m telling you, folks, the disconnect between, say, people under 40 and everybody else in terms of traditional, human philosophy, American values, it is stunning. No, no, no, I’m not naive. I’ve known all kinds of people make fun of positive thinking. Don’t misunderstand. But it happens in a specific personal way, not an overall rebuke of the effort or of the mind-set.
Have these people never listened to professional athletes talk about how they go about their jobs? Have you ever listened to people that play golf? Folks, you cannot be a PGA tournament champion without the ability to think positive and to banish, you not only have to do that, you have to banish negative thoughts about yourself and your ability as often as you can. If you can’t do that, you’re never gonna win. If you get caught up in the “I can’ts” or the “I am horrible, I can’t play this game,” if you get caught up in that, you’re cooked, you’re done, you’re toast.
How many of you have seen Tiger Woods didn’t make the cut in the postround interview talk about how well he thinks he’s playing, just didn’t make enough puts or just, you know, wasn’t quite good enough off the tee. You never hear these guys saying that they suck. Never. And all professional athletes, I mean, the true champions — and there are very few of those — all of them are the same way when it comes to the notion of positive thinking.
In fact, I would venture so far as to say that most successful people have a modicum or a portion of their existence that is devoted to positive thinking, that they can do it, that they are good. You can’t otherwise achieve great heights if you are obsessed with negativism, particularly about yourself. And here’s another thing. How many of you have encountered people who are just constantly negative all the time about themselves and about you and about this — you don’t want any part of ’em.
You don’t want to hang around them. It’s why I’ve always said to people who ask me advice questions on life, for example radio, “Whatever you do, do not hang around with people who failed at it. They are a dime a dozen. They’re everywhere. Do not hang around ’em. They don’t want you to succeed because they didn’t.”
And this goes for anybody, in any endeavor, whatever you want to do, make sure you find the people who’ve succeeded at it. If you’re gonna try to learn something from somebody, if you’re gonna try to be inspired or motivated, do not talk to people who failed, ultimately failed. If you want to talk to people who have succeeded, who experience failure along the way and how they dealt with it, fine. But you want to find the people who have succeeded, and that’s whose brains you want to pick.
But I just want to remind you one more time about the media and their purpose here. They know that if realism, if a mature, realism of the assessment of where we are as a nation in regard to the economy and COVID-19, if reality replaces panic, then they, the Democrats and the media, are doomed. If we learn to live with it like we have with the flu, that’d be the worst thing possible for them.
And again, the flu is far more prevalent out there. It hospitalizes more, it infects more, it kills more, in raw numbers. And yet we’ve learned to deal with it. We’ve never shut down the country because of it. And if we learn to live with COVID-19, which we’re gonna have to, by the way. We can’t stay sequestered for the rest of our life.
We can’t stay quarantined. We’re gonna have to learn to live with it. This another thing Trump was pointing out. Anyway, to me that’s all nothing more than common-sense reality. And the idea that all of that is the essential equivalent of a foreign language to people under 40, whew. What an eye-opener.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Bill in East Troy, Wisconsin. Welcome, sir. Great to have you with us today. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, it’s great to finally get a chance to talk to you after all these years of listening. Hey, my question is, for the president anyways, is to say in response, thank God it’s not 20,000 a day like the fake media, fake news wanted us to believe, because weren’t we supposed to have like piles of dead bodies by now, like 200 million? So he could have come back and said, “Well, we’re thankful isn’t 20,000 a day like the Fake Media wanted us to believe.”
RUSH: I have to tell you, that is a — let’s review this. Because that is a good point. The original number — in fact, let’s go to the line 5 and grab Marty because the same process here. Marty’s in Pittsburgh where, by the way, they’re gonna try guaranteed universal income. They’re one of 15 cities that’s gonna try it in Pittsburgh. Here is Marty, and I’m glad you called. What is your point here?
CALLER: Rush, we were initially told that 2.2 million people were going to die. The CDC told us that.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: We’re at 150,000, that’s tragic, but it’s a far cry from 2.2 million and I think Trump and the government should be given credit for at least limiting those numbers —
RUSH: Do you think Trump ought to not be saying, “hey, it is what it is”?
CALLER: I think he should be taking credit for the people that are still alive. They told us we’re losing two million people —
RUSH: You know, that’s what Obama would be doing. Obama sure as hell would be — by the way, this is another question. Getting off on a tangent. What the hell is Obama surfacing all of a sudden for? You know, these guys crashed the John Lewis funeral, Clinton goes in there, crashes it, President Obama went in there, Obama turned his eulogy into a political speech against Trump, same thing that happened at the McCain funeral. We’ll get to that.
But this is exactly right. The original number of deaths was gonna be 2.2 million. Remember it was from that bogus computer modeling guy in the U.K., Neil somebody, and he had not factored in anything like social distancing, 2.2 million. They used that number on Trump to get him to shut down the country. This is important.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So that 2.2 million number, the guy’s name was Neil Ferguson, and it’s a name now synonymous with disasters. I forget the name of his organization, but he’s one of the two people that produced computer models projecting the number — this is way back in February and March — projecting the number of deaths from COVID-19. The other one was out of the state of Washington.
Now, the thing to remember is that these two different outcomes have yet to be correct in their projections of the number of deaths. The Ferguson model from the U.K. forecast 2.2 million deaths in the United States, 500,000 deaths in the U.K. Those were the first numbers reported. They caused an outright panic. Those were the numbers. Those were the first numbers that President Trump heard. And he kept using them in press conferences. He kept using the 2.2 million number as a justification for shutting down the country.
And I remember coming to the golden microphone every day and telling everybody that number should have never been used, that 2.2 million deaths was never accurate, it was never relevant. And the reason was that the guy who did the computer modeling didn’t factor in any mitigating behavior. If we did nothing, 2.2 million people would have died. If we just continued to go about our business, then 2.2 million people would die before the end of the year.
Well, then the guy got a lot of grief for that so he factored in, okay, what if everybody practices social distancing, meaning what happens if we quarantine or sequester and maintain six feet separation. You know what the 2.2 million number became? It was like 200,000, 240,000. I mean, it was reduced by 90%. And even that was high. But the 2.2 million number was out, and it had been allowed to do its work. It had caused panic.
But his model forecast 2.2 million dead with nobody doing anything. That number should have never been used. So the 500,000 dead in the U.K. became 20,000 after social distancing was factored into his model. The 2.2 million, actually, I think it became 180 or 200,000 in America. And then that number started to be used more frequently. But they succeeded in getting that 2.2 million deaths out there in the United States.
And it’s no wonder, folks, it’s no wonder that the average American now thinks 30 million Americans have died, 9% of the population. Look, this is all politics, and it’s corrupting so much. It’s corrupting now professional sports. It’s corrupting weather. It’s corrupting medicine. And it’s a particular kind of politics that’s doing this corrupting. It’s liberalism. It’s the politics of the Democrat Party.
This guy, Ferguson, London Imperial College. That’s right. That’s where this guy’s computer models are. That’s where he works. But he was wrong about the numbers of dead in Sweden. And Sweden didn’t do much of any mitigating behavior for a while.
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